How paranoia over trans rights became catnip for QAnon and the far right

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “In a moment when those groups are hyper-visible in the culture, but no one really knows that much about them, it’s not especially surprising to me that QAnon latched there, because it really needed something new.” A screenshot from a recent Telegram discussion about a family with a transgender child By June 2021, trans discussions had become common, appearing in channels for die-hard neo-Nazis, anti-lockdown activists, and British sovereign citizens. “Ever since then I’ve been just trying to understand what on Earth has been happening – how I got to this point, how other people I know got to this point, how on Earth it’s scrambled our brains.” Leveille starts her TAnon timeline in the early 2010s, when many environmentalists in the US Pacific Northwest cut ties with a radical group called Deep Green Resistance for excluding trans people. “They tried with Gavin Grimm and the bathrooms, and that worked a little bit, but there was such a backlash.” A sign protesting North Carolina’s HB2 law at Bull McCabe’s Irish Pub in Durham, North Carolina, 2016 However, Greenesmith adds, the evangelical right is “big enough to continually be trying a tonne of different strategies – and when something works, nimble enough and well-funded enough to push their resources behind that successful strategy.” Hence, in 2017, a Virginia conservative named Meg Kilgannon gave a speech at a major activist conference arguing that social conservatives needed to “focus on gender identity to divide and conquer”. “Not simply because they’re untrue and over-the-top, but because there are actual, real, widespread forms of suffering and harm that children endure every day, which do not elicit that kind of response: the mass incarceration of black and brown children, the impunity with which police murder black children, or the institutionalised sexual assault and abuse of children that happens in places like churches and schools and sports teams, or in the institution of the family itself.” That, she contends, is also how parents who oppose their children’s transitions can justify sending them to conversion therapists, or how Texas politicians can order that trans children should be taken away from parents who support their transitions.